Education should be a 'training ground for
citizenship,' West says

Academia is an integral component in overcoming
multicultural problems that plague American society today, Harvard scholar
Cornell West told administrators at a recent campus meeting.

"I
believe, frankly, that we're living among the most frightening and
terrifying moments in history," he said. "The level of polarization and
increase in cold-heartedness and mean-spiritedness is, in fact, the making
of the unraveling of democracy.

"I do believe that institutions of
higher learning, especially elite institutions of higher learning, can
play a very important role in trying to renew, regenerate and rejuvenate
democratic responsibility."

West, professor of religion and
Afro-American studies at Harvard, said that academic institutions must be
committed to high-quality scholarly input in the quest for truth and
knowledge.

"With issues of race, gender and sexual orientation,
it's very important to cast any such reflection on those issues at an
intellectual level," he said. "So when we're talking about race and the
legacy of white supremacy, the ways in which that legacy is inseparable
from the rest of the development of democracy in America is not a matter
of being psychologically sensitive, it's an intellectual issue.

"We
can't understand modernity, we can't understand the age of Europe, we
can't understand the American experience without understanding the legacy
of white supremacy, which includes the suffering of people of color, but
also includes the various moral choices and political commitments of
Americans of all colors, vis-a-vis this dividing issue, both in this
country and in Europe. These are not in any way PC issues to be
jettisoned, but rather to understand these issues as part of what it is to
be human, what it is to be modern, what it is to be New World, what it is
to be American."

West said that institutions of higher learning
must try to facilitate "a broad intellectual conversation based, in part,
on the high-quality, scholarly input that goes far beyond the academy,
contributing to the public culture to ensure that we're confronting some
of the most difficult facts and tragic truths of the past and
present."

Many academicians, he added, must have a broad sense of
the interrelationships and interdependence of different peoples and
institutions.

"This is not the calling of every academic and ought
not to be, since there's a division of labor," West said. "But at the same
time, if we lose sense of the whole of how things hold together or what it
means to relate life to the mind or what it means to be a citizen in a
highly intellectual civilization, then I think we are in deep
trouble."

West also said that public service, in terms of shaping
and molding the minds of students, plays an important role in
fosteringunderstanding of multiculturalism.

"Education should not
simply be a site where we acquire skills, but should be a training ground
for citizenship," he said. "Public service forces us to affirm the way in
which we are linked, are bound together. We have to convince each other
that we're all on the same ship, even if it has a huge leak in it."